英美短篇小 说Unit 7 An Ideal Family

单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,Katherine Mansfield,Unit 7,An Ideal Family,Major Works,In a German Pension(1911),The Woman at the store(1912),The prelude(1918),Bliss and Other Stories(1920),Garden Party and Other Stories(1922),At the Bay(1922),The Canary(1922),The Fly(1922),The Doves Nest,and Other stories(1923),Something Childish(1924),Brief introduction of Katherine Mansfield,Katherine Mansfield has acquired an international reputation as a writer of short stories,poetry,letters,journals and reviews.Her work has been translated into more than 25 languages.She was born in Wellington,New Zealand,into a middle-class colonial family.Her father was an ambitious businessman and her mother was a fastidious and delicate woman.,At 19,Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in the United Kingdom,where she became a friend of modernist writers such asD.H.LawrenceandVirginia Woolf.In 1917 she was diagnosed withextra pulmonarytuberculosis,which led to her death at the age of 34.,The New Dawn,Katherine Mansfield was one of a“new dawn in English literature with T S Elliot,James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.She was associated with the brilliant group of writers who made the London of the period the centre of the literary world.,Nevertheless,Mansfield was a New Zealand writer-she could not have written as she did had she not gone to live in England and France,but she could not have done her best work if she had not had firm roots in her native land.She used her memories in her writing from the beginning,people,the places,even the colloquial speech of the country form the fabric of much of her best work.,Significance,Mansfields stories were the first of significance in English to be written without a conventional plot.,Supplanting the strictly structured plots of her predecessors in the genre(Edgar Allan Poe,Rudyard Kipling,H.G.Wells),Mansfield concentrated on one moment,a crisis or a turning point,rather than on a sequence of events.,The plot is secondary to mood and characters.The stories are innovative in many other ways.They feature simple things-a dolls house or a charwoman.Her imagery,frequently from nature,flowers,wind and colors,set the scene with which readers can identify easily,.,Themes of Her Works,human isolation,the questioning of traditional roles of men and women in society,the conflict between love and disillusionment,idealism and reality,beauty and ugliness,joy and suffering and the inevitability of these paradoxes,Oblique narration(influenced by Chekhov but certainly developed by Mansfield)includes the use of symbolism-the dolls house lamp,the fly,the pear tree-hinting at the hidden layers of meaning.Suggestion and implication replace direct detail.,“Looking back,I imagine I was always writing.Twaddle it was too.But better far write twaddle or anything,anything,than nothing at all.,Katherine Mansfield,letter to Ottoline Morrell(January 1922),An Ideal Family,An Ideal Family,An Ideal Family,was written byKatherine Mansfieldand first published in the literary magazine the,Sphere,on August 20,1921 and later incorporated into,The Garden Party,and Other Stories,in 1922.,Set in New Zealand,possibly in Wellington,An Ideal Family,is an,examination of self-worth,within a family social structure as seen through the eyes of an aging patriarch.,Mansfield,ever the modernist,often experimented with structure and narrative.,Plot,S,ummary,Mr.Neave,a successful businessman,is reluctant to leave his profession and only source of true identity.His home life is dominated by his family,who he barely recognizes anymore,and he feels both unwelcome and out of place in their frivolous world of dinners and parties.Mr.Neave prided himself on his sense of duty and committed work ethic,which allowed for a bourgeois life of luxury for himself and his family.,Now Mr.Neave sees his wife and adult children as if for the first time,realizing that he does not know them as well as he should and resents their dominate presence in his home.Life has passed him by.He isolated himself from his family in order to build his business,an investment that enabled him to successfully provided his family with everything they desired.,Now that he is of retirement age,.,H,owever,he finds he is a burden at home,corralled by his grown daughters into doing what they want and coddled by his wife who seems only passingly interested in his wellbeing.,Mr.Neave,s self-worth is solely invested in his business but now that the balance of work and play has been disrupted by his failing health,he fears the loss of both his identity as a businessman and the collapse of his company by his negligent son,Harold who lacks any sense of duty or familial responsibility.,Writing,T,echniques,Although the story appears,structure-less,the third person narrative,and the,internal monologue,of the protagonist,Mr.Neave,centers the plot,s progression around the inner struggle of the main character as he comes to terms with his pending retirement.,The third person narrative supp